


Teeth

by lavendre



Category: Tales of Berseria
Genre: Character Study, F/F, Hurt No Comfort, Hurt/Comfort, Love Confessions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-13
Updated: 2018-10-13
Packaged: 2019-08-01 09:03:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,145
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16281653
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lavendre/pseuds/lavendre
Summary: In the dark of the Van Eltia’s cabin Velvet presses a thin and simple blade to her throat.Magilou is still learning how to be afraid.





	Teeth

**Author's Note:**

> This was written in January of 2017. I tidied it up recently. The first line is from Eskimeaux's _Curses_ , which is lovely and haunting, and you should listen to.

**maybe i thought a kiss could lift the curse and still your bones  
**  
  
Magilou doesn’t believe in second chances but she does believe in self-worth. If there’s enough of it, a broken heart can come back from anything.  
  
But there’s a question she’d like to ask whoever set her on this plane of existence: if a daemon has more emotions than a human girl, where does that leave her?  
  
Let’s be real here: she doesn’t mean to overthink it. She remembers the exact moment when all her feelings left her body -- it takes a certain period of time to foster the numbness and a short amount to instill it. A glass of wine will do the same. Her troupe was a myriad of scandal and drama, wrapped up in an elegant bow with her at the center. Strangers with faces she didn’t know called her name with joy and pleasure, coin passed hands because she was good at entertainment for a child. She looked at the crowd and they saw a cursed girl -- a witch, with eyes that see what’s not there. The malakhim tried not to look at her too closely; the next potential candidate that could wield their name like a blade and pull them apart at the seams. That girl didn’t stand a chance.  
  
Even now, with her hair smoking gray in the grass as she hold’s the link between worlds, Velvet at her back, somewhere -- Melchior’s voice rings like the toll of a bell in her ears. How many years did they spend living lives as people who cared about each other? She can’t recall. Lately, her dreams have taken a different shape: her hand is beast like, animalistic, demonic. She’s swimming in the dirt and the static of an unconquerable future, and she’s not sad, she knows this routine, but something is different.  
  
_I don’t care what path this world takes._  
  
She doesn’t. She doesn’t. She... doesn’t.  
  
But she wishes she felt something. Something other than  _wanting_.  
  
  
  
  
Thus, the day she actually died was a blessing.  
  
All the beggars on the streets who wait for Innominat to bring them into the new world don’t know the reality of what awaits on the other side. And she hasn’t been  _there_  there, but if it’s anything like the dream world that broke her and nearly Velvet too, she’ll see this entire world’s inhabitants there at some point. It gives some peace of mind. She doesn’t have to work too hard to bring to light the evil in the world.  
  
The cellar under Loegres’ courthouse is water damaged. Magillanica watches the dark flecks of water run from the slanted ceiling to the chipped pieces of stone work. A demon last laid here and now something less. In no reality could she have imagined promises and a love so easily retracted but it’s warped just like these stones, made even more disastrous by the swinging lamp light, edges, corners, particles of dust floating before her eyes. It’s too bright and so she looks away.  
  
He stops in front of her. He won’t open the door and she won’t expect him to. His presence chases away the terrors for a moment and she allows herself to think heavily on what he looked like to her. A guardian? A mentor? A solution to her vulnerability? He helped her into a skin when she had none. Except you can’t play dress up with those -- he knew better, and once, she would have liked to have thought that she did too.  
  
Ironically, she’s finally reached her full potential: she can’t feel anything at all. The perfect solider for the perfect world they’ve all dreamed of. It’s freeing, in a sense, to not give a damn about the future. It means she won’t respond to the call of her name.  
  
It means that, in this moment, she is entirely removed from the consequences of living.  
  
“I’ve been disappointed by students before, but I have to admit, I thought you might be the one to break the mold.” Melchior leans up against the bars, or at least, that’s what she imagines. She can’t lift her head from where it lays flat against her chest, but it’s the posture he adopts when he’s preparing for a great and meaningful deliverance. “You are in fact, the greatest disappointment and the most incredible student I’ve had. You can think on your weakness in Titania. Maybe you’ll figure something out for yourself and realize that you’ve used me, too.”  
  
She laughs, but her jaw doesn’t move, and sound doesn’t come out.  
  
“One more thing: our paths should not cross in the future. I will not be gentle.”  
  
That it was true that no one had loved her. She shouldn’t care, but it must mean a whole lot of something that she does.  
  
_How did it come to this?_  
  
The trip to Titania is punctuated by nothingness. The cellar in the ship is the same as the cage she lived her childhood in. He let her run free after her failure, but she crossed a line at some point -- at least she can trust his threats to be real, if not his heart.  
  
Melchior looks her in the eye. She envisions her hands around his throat, thumbs pressed into his jugular, squeezing out his honey voice until he asphyxiates on his own promise. He’d die while looking into her eyes, syrup pouring from his ears with nostrils flared wide as day, eyes bugging out, and then she would be satisfied enough to look away for a while as he shudders into nonexistence.  
  
_I’ll grind your heart into dust for the last time. No more repairs, Magillanica._  
  
She’d like to see him take from her what she no longer has.  
  
  
  
  
Titania is a punishment almost as much for the prisoners as the guards.  
  
Magilou watches the exorcists stumble about in pairs, lances clinking against the ground in a lazy stride. Their malakhim follow on their heels like a shadow manifested into a man -- except some are as young as children, and Magilou’s gaze lingers the longest on them.  
  
Her cellar is more like a room -- not that the guards could keep her contained for long. About the time she realizes she’s left ship so she notices the way her arms lacks strength, her spells falter on her tongue like she simply forgot the words. She has no magic left in her.  
  
In the deepest, darkest pool of the island, there is a mass swelling in the bottom like fumigating water in a jar in the window. It seeps up like a miasma; one or two or three exorcists join the prisoners in their cells every month.  
  
If she had power like that, she’d use it to destroy the Abbey’s entire head. Rip the teeth from the skull.  
  
She almost wishes vainly that someone would take her and use her, too.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Velvet’s not a child, but she’s about as brash one.  
  
She doesn’t care about what her words mean to people who might, she’s unfazed by the premise of death and has no regard for the majority of people around her -- except for the boy, but that’s another story.  
  
The only thing that matters at all is Artorius being knocked off his clandestine throne. Magilou can admit this: there’s no bullshit quite like the promise of a better tomorrow. It’s impressive how she doesn’t waiver -- much -- when confronted with her own weakness. Her eyes get hard and murdery and someone gets dead. Velvet gets results and Magilou follows her wantonly, wandering from one town to the next. It’s amusing at first. She only notices what she needs to go, so it’s a relief to not have another pair of eyes looking for a hint of a story.  
  
Velvet had called Artorius family, once. Surely if he she hadn’t transformed that day, Artorius would have found another opportunity to dispose of her, too. Magilou doesn’t make the rules.  
  
She screamed her pain to the entire world while Magilou chucked her heart like a butterfly in reverse; first, it peels out much like a seed from the fruit -- second, leave them for the crows to pick clean. Third, forget the rest of the universe because it never gave a damn about you.  
  
She can’t stand it. Velvet despite everything clings more dearly to her humanity than anyone Magilou has ever seen, and if feeling is what makes people monsters then it’s a curse they all share responsibility for.  
  
Magilou is really trying to not think too much about it.  
  
If she has to stay around her any longer she might just change, too. And then -- what was the point of it all?  
  
  
  
  
  
  
In the dark of the Van Eltia’s cabin Velvet presses a thin and simple blade to her throat.  
  
At this moment, Magilou’s heart should be pounding: she’s been close to death but so rarely does she get to look it in the eyes and for all that Eizen calls himself a reaper, the fact is that humans are weak to their environments and more people have turned to violence around Velvet than him. There’s no outcome Velvet could offer her that she hadn’t already considered herself. In that way, she’s entirely predictable. The knife is an empty threat.  
  
Velvet’s eyes glow a hard amber in the dark. She looks more beast like here, but Magilou is still learning how to be afraid. “I need to ask you something,” she says calmly. Never a good sign.  
  
Magilou wets her lips. She’s still lying in her cot with a book she’d been reading shoved off to the side beside her. She hadn’t really been asleep when she heard the door open, it was simply easier to let Velvet think she had everyone under her thumb. “Are you sure this isn’t an interrogation? I don’t even have pants on, dear.”  
  
It’s not the wrong thing to say, but Velvet’s eye twitches and it’s the equivalent of fighting off the urge to look when you’ve been distinctly told not to. Okay, so getting a reaction out of Velvet by needling her to death isn’t the most rewarding thing in the world, but it’s damn close. And that knife is a little too close for comfort, maybe, but it makes the environment suddenly a whole lot more interesting. What goes bump in the night for them is often someone getting a whole lot more dead -- maybe Velvet’s gotten bored of her, and this is the prologue to her ending.  
  
_Not a bad way to go, at least I’m in a bed and not a ditch_.  
  
Velvet keeps her arm steady. Power is beautiful. It’s the little things that define a person, right? “I’ve been doing some thinking since your thoughtful stunt--” uh oh, “--and I want you to tell me what you’re trying to prove, here.”  
  
Magilou swallows and clasps her hands together over her stomach. Her shirt is rumpled under her palms, which are still slightly clammy from the long seconds she’d spent breathing air on them. It’s Hellawes out there -- hell and winter, specifically. The window has a thin sheen of frost when she woke in the morning and now and it’s as icy as before. The breeze still lingers around Velvet, cold air clinging to her and Magilou can’t push it away without repercussion.  
  
“My thoughtful stunt? I’m thoughtful all the time, you’re going to have to be more specific at this time of night. I’m a tired woman.”  
  
Velvet sighs, irritated. “Your comments. Why am I the one you interfere with more than anyone else? It’s like you think you’ve made some clever joke and I can’t figure it out. So enlighten me, please. I’m dying to know.”  
  
The knife is sharp and jumping when she speaks now, so she best be a little more honest than usual. And the moment in question: watching Mayvin get devoured really wasn’t done by much of her hand, but if Velvet wants to think so, a lady must oblige. “You’re just so... explosive. Like a rabid dog. Like a bee’s nest! It’s exciting to see what comes out of the hive.”   
  
“Depending on the bee it would only take one to kill you.”  
  
Magilou smiles. “I have a handsome fly swatter.”  
  
Velvet curses and roughly shakes Magilou by the shoulders instead. “For once, would you be serious--” She did her the favor of removing her gauntlet before dinner so even though it’s just after midnight, the only pain is the grip of her inhuman hand. Regardless Magilou’s pillow shifts away from behind her head and it’s the strings of the cot her head bounces off against -- that will be some hella whiplash in the morning -- not comfortable, so she swallows and tries again, flailing her arms against Velvet’s chest.  
  
“Okayokayokay, allow me to rephrase since you can’t work these things out for yourself: I just can’t contain how much I despise you and it leaks out at the worst of times. Sorry. Happy now?”  
  
Velvet’s frowning, which isn’t unusual, but underneath the fringe of her black bangs, her brow is pinched in what can only be frustration and that’s new. It makes her reconsider.  
  
“Why is everything that comes out of your mouth so twisted from what you actually mean? I can’t be any more clear. You treat me different. You call me an inconvenience, but you look at me as if -- as if there’s something to _admire_.”  
  
She doesn’t mean to smile bitterly but being called out by her is irritating. “Because I’m a witch. Maybe my spell is the power of illusions, too.”  
  
Velvet releases her shoulders and stomps away. The cot swings from where her weight had left it and Magilou takes the moment to gather her thoughts, thumb pressing to the spot where Velvet had nearly nicked her. So she was more transparent than she used to be. Just another repercussion of Magillanica’s departure and really not something to be mourned. Velvet might just make her regret it though.  
  
“Maybe so. Maybe you learned from your mentor about as well as I did,” Velvet says simply. She’s talking to the empty space in the cabin. It rattles her, just a little. “You’re invested in this mess now, though. You’re going to help me kill Artorius, right?”  
  
Magilou’s eyes narrow at her back. “Maybe I just want to watch.”  
  
“Did Melchior’s death mean that little?”  
  
No.  _It meant the whole world._  
  
Magilou sits up and swings her legs over the edge of the bed, bare feet padding softly on the floor. She stands and stretches, listening to the happy pop of her joints and the crack of her neck. She could stand here all night and if she stared long enough, Velvet would match right up with the dark grain of the cabin’s interior. It’s right. It’s how she is and it’s how she should disappear when this is all over -- back into the same bleak dark she crawled out of.  
  
And yet.  
  
She sighs. Rubs her neck. “Velvet, you’re like a needle in my eye. You came her for something and now you’re skirting the topic. Having regrets? Believe me, I’m old enough to know what those look like. They’re quite nasty. What is it you want?”  
  
Her voice is quiet. “I want to know -- what it means when you look at me the way you do. You’ve changed. Maybe I’m concerned. You could be a liability now.”  
  
“Ha! You, worried? And here I thought we had become so close.”  
  
“Is that was this is?” Velvet’s voice is emotionless. “You think you know what I feel at all? You think you know me?”  
  
Magilou does something she hasn’t done before. She bites her lips, watching Velvet slip further into a blade, and asks.  
  
“Listen, Velvet, do you want to hear a story?”  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
If one skirts the edge of Stonebury, they know the area between Loegres and the miles of farmland is separated by sharp rocks and dynamite blasted roads. Carriages rumble along on four wheels pulled by the long legs of horses, snorting in the autumn weather, the cool breeze, the call of rain.  
  
A troupe starts their season with a kick: to the capital, where they can draw their largest and most important investors. And to present their most important attraction: a blue eyed girl who hallucinates the revered.  
  
_Are they joking? A child, with resonance that high?  
  
Look at her -- that gaze is wicked. Her face is so cold.  
  
A malakhim that responds to her call could only be a demon. All of the malakhim in the kingdom are employed by the Abbey._  
  
What one fails to consider is the enormous change of hands from a king to his consort. Architects drop the pen for the blade, builders retire to the old walls and rebuild them, farmers pick up the sword. The new gets forgotten, left alone.  
  
And so it’s easy to say that the cart fell because of the rains, a landslide taking horse, wheels, and the whole lot down the embankment. It’s not even a gradient -- a sharp divide, a killing blow for all. After all, these are mere humans. They don’t believe in magic and they can’t see it anyway to know. The girl watches the dash of blue fire ride the hill above them and disappear, making the dirt tremble in its wake. But that’s the sickness she carries. She’ll be dead before she’s twelve, they’re saying, got to make a profit now.  
  
_The witch has cursed us all to our fates. We shouldn’t have taken her.  
  
Too late for that now. We’re all cursed, it don’t matter an’ way._  
  
Has she? The girl doesn’t even know the words. Dirt is dirt and they all are composed from it and will return to it eventually. Rain is bad for business. She didn’t make a mistake to show fear.  
  
It gets smeared in the mud, on the side of the canvas roof, where she wakes, head over heels, blood running down her chin, ankle twisted but not broken. Everything is broken. Pieces everywhere. She wonders what makes them fall fast. Summer vegetables thrown at the stage now lay strewn across the canyon floor. Human hair and horse hair mix. Dying noises, choking breaths, dripping water, silence. The cavernous gnawing silence of a great drop and a lot of air -- her heart beat as erratic as the hare that froze in sight of the dog.  
  
The girl crawls through the wreckage and dripping things. An equilibrium passes between her and her companions. It’s the first time permission to leave has been granted by silence. She’s not happy, but she’s not sad. This is what happens to bad people, they would have said. If they were bad, then why is she still alive?  
  
On the other side of the disaster, a man holds out his hand to her and calls her by name. It’s not fair, she tells him later, that they made her come on this trip.  _I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to go anywhere with anyone._  
  
“A lot of things aren’t fair in this world, but remember this: you have power, and as long as you recognize it, others are powerless in the face of it.”  
  
She doesn’t remember what her father looks like or the color of her mother’s eyes -- whether she had one sibling or ten -- just that they didn’t share themselves with her. And it was alright. It was alright because she was wrong to see the malakhim.  
  
Mayvin holds her hand and gives her courage. His cloak is soft and clean where he wraps it around her scraped shoulders, encasing her in something foreign and warm. It stirs something in the pit of her stomach. It makes her want to be good like this, too.  


  
  
  
Velvet’s hair is long and dark like the sea.  
  
“That boy can’t comb worth a damn,” Magilou mutters, hand curling through another knot.  
  
“You would know,” Velvet muses. Her back is stiff as a rod but her feet push the cot back and forth with one foot, calf brushing up against the other. She can hear the bristle from here.  
  
Magilou clenches her fists in the hair around Velvet’s ears, black and soft and as lovely as what she was named for, and even if none of them bathe enough from week to week it must have been this beautiful even before her transformation from a girl into a beast.  
  
“You have to know, I was really rather hoping that that Oscar fella would gut you when we first met. I could move on and find someone else to bother. Frankly, your drama is so cliche I dread being around it too long. What if you rub off on me? Awful.”  
  
Velvet says nothing. Her eyes bore into empty space, amber like the foliage, the duskcape of the canopies outside her old village. Can she really have so many faces? Magilou felt like she was just learning one when she let loose another. Can she do that, too? _Can I have so many sides, so may emotions?_  
  
“You remind me so much of myself when I was young. And that’s what you are! Still a child. I can’t blame you, I guess, but you’re so single-minded it’s almost stupid.” Magilou traces the line of her throat to her collar bone, thumb pressing against a pocket mark made by the indent of a button.  
  
Velvet’s voice is quiet. “I took your revenge from you. I can’t say I’m sorry, though. Melchior needed to die so you could be free.”  
  
Magilou stops moving.  
  
_Freedom? What even is that, anymore? We’re all slaves to your calamity, stupid girl!_  
  
Then hysteria bubbles forth and she bares her teeth, platinum hair cascading off the side of her shoulder and sliding along Velvet’s own. “Sorry? Gods, why would you be? You’re not apologetic, you’re an absolute monster, honest! I’d think you a basketcase if you did. You’ve gone too far to turn back now. Besides, that old man was fucking crazy.”  
  
“When everything is over, you’ll get what you wanted. You’ll have to wait a little while longer.”  
  
She knows what that means, and yet --   
  
“Heh.” Magilou leaned over and caught the corner of Velvet’s mouth in a peck. “If it’s not by my hand, it’s not mine to claim at all. If you do it for me and everyone else, though -- I can take that as compromise. What a shame though. No one’s waiting for you to come home, anymore. Did you ever think of what you would do after killing your brother in law? You going to adopt Phi and return to your empty village to bake pies and play house?”  
  
Velvet’s demon hand reached out for her, then withdrew into a fist. “Once, perhaps. Doesn’t matter now. There’s no home left that would take me.”  
  
“Hell is always warm and welcoming, I hear,” Magilou murmurs.  
  
Velvet smiles, just a tad, turning to meet her eyes. “Is that with you?”  
  
“With me?” And oh --  _oh._  
  
“You didn’t have to stay Magilou. Are you going to come with me to see how this ends?”  
  
“I said I would already, didn’t I? Don’t ask me to repeat myself.”  
  
“Promise?”  
  
“Wha -- what are we, five?”  
  
“I don’t know. You’re the only one who plays games anymore. Promise me.”  
  
“Games,” she gasps tragically. “I opened my heart to you because you placed a blade against my throat, and now, you’re insulting me--!”  
  
“You love me,” she says, tone accusing and sharp. Magilou feels her chest seize and contract. Anything but that.  
  
But the idea is in Velvet’s mind now. She played too many of her cards, and she should have guessed the feeling as it creeped up. Jokes on her.  
  
“ _Love_ ,” Magilou croaks. She can hardly believe the desperate edge to her own voice.  _“Love_  is for idiots. It’s a  _joke_. It’s not real. Not in this world, anyhow. All the fools in this world believe in it, but it’s a lie, Velv. Love  _destroys_.”  
  
_It’s what turned you into a demon and me into a witch. There’s nothing good in it for either of us._  
  
“You love me.” Velvet seems to marvel the sound of her own voice. She stares Magilou in the face for so long that she starts to shift, uncomfortable. “And you weren’t going to tell me.”  
  
Magilou feels so small she can hardly breathe. Not this again.  
  
She could leave, she supposes. Walk out. She doesn’t have to face it. If she doesn’t acknowledge the conversation, it’s as good as dead. It’s as dead as Melchior in the pit of Velvet’s stomach, as Artorius will be when karma finally claims its due. As dead as her troupe on the valley floor, so many decades ago.  
  
“Magilou Lou Mayvin, you’re the real moron.”  
  
Velvet shoves her backward into the cot, clambering over her legs until she’s awkwardly sitting in her lap, and then her mouth comes down too hard and Magilou nearly breaks the skin on her lips. Velvet braces herself on her shoulders, pushing her down into the blanket nest she’d called home for weeks and weeks -- Velvet’s mouth is decidely warm, sloppy, and inexperienced, but Magilou forgets how to breath anyway. Velvet is demanding -- she should have known egging her on would lead to a confrontation. She didn’t imagine she’d have the life sucked out of her by doing so.  
  
“Tell me you don’t,” Velvet murmurs, mouth wet and sweet tasting from kissing  _her_  lips, “and I’ll stop right now.”  
  
Magilou feels like she might break. “I can’t.”  
  
“You can,” Velvet emphasizes. “Are you choosing not to?”  
  
She takes hold of the hand on her shoulder and places it against her neck. “Feel that?” she pants, “That’s why. It’s out of control. Ridiculous. Must be a -- another curse or something--”  
  
“That’s your heart,” Velvet replies, amused. “It means you’re alive.” Her free hand lays half-curled against her ear. It’s the demon hand, not quite touching her. Magilou wants to hold it and burn it. It’s making her come unglued. She could imagine a world where Velvet Crowe might kiss her like this, but never out of affection, never out of a desire to know something as deeply personal as her own feelings.  
  
“No shit,” she gasps. Velvet pulls her lower lip into her mouth and it was as crude and gut-wrenching as watching her pipe dream crumble. All her barriers are getting torn right out between her own cleverly built walls.  
  
It’s like, here is the impression of a girl, but the light from the lamp catches the curse in her eyes and the beast within -- will you devour me, too?  
  
_You don’t get it, Velvet. I didn’t want your pity._  
  
“What are you scared of?”  
  
“I think you’re going to hurt me even worse,” she cried. She wrapped her arms around Velvet’s shoulders, pulling her down to her level. “And you’re doing it deliberately -- well, perhaps, to an extent, I did it to myself by not paying attention--”  
  
“Go with it. You’ll grow through it.” She plants a kiss along her neck where her pulse spasmed like it might leave her body, fingers sliding down her arm and leaping to her ribs, tracing the outline of bone and muscle and sinew and  _what the hell, was she_ smiling --  
  
“I’m tired of learning! I’m tired of all these lessons!”  
  
“That’s still not a good reason --”  
  
“That’s because you’re young and still going through it.”  
  
Velvet haults, and Magilou scrambles, turning them over just barely, just enough that she can pin Velvet with her own weight and not have to feel the force of that love smothering her. She sits on Velvet’s legs, warm patches of skin through the holes of her stockings making her shiver against the cold air. She hadn’t realized how much this moment would mean to her. To have Velvet with her, even for a little while, even for a little while longer --  
  
“You’re still going through the motions,” she says again. “You’re not free to choose until all this business is concluded. And listen. The old me -- she broke. I can’t do any more breaking, Velvet. Not if you’re going to leave anyway. So you better tell me you’re gonna stay.”  
  
“...I don’t know what will happen. Artorius will die. Innominat too, I suppose. I’ll have to take care of him somehow.”  
  
“You’ll have to kill him.”  _And that will kill you in turn, won’t it?_  
  
Velvet’s hand fiddled with hem of her own shirt, the most domestic move she’d seen yet -- and then she slumped backwards. “I don’t have all the answers. I will kill him. I don’t know -- I don’t know what will happen after. The Empyreans will probably do me in.”  
  
_You’re not going to fight them, too?  
  
No. We are partly in the wrong, after all.  
  
__The wrong side of history, or simply wearing the wrong clothes?_  
  
Magilou reaches over without preamble for the book she left abandoned and slaps it against Velvet’s thigh, making her stiffen. “Scoot. I’m the one without pants, if you recall. I won’t be harassed out of my own royal bed.”  
  
Velvet sighs and the whole cot sways. “So cast a spell, then. Are you a witch or aren’t you?”  
  
“What do  _you_  think I am?”   
  
She lays a hand on her thigh and leaves it there.  
  
It’s about the same movement as spell casting, except a different kind.   
  
Velvet huffs hot air right into her throat. She pulls her head back as if to lunge at her. “Stupid, we’ve all proclaimed the same thing, haven’t we? It doesn’t matter. Just  _win_.”  
  
Magilou smiles with her eyes, feeling the years push her down once more into the dark. Suddenly she was seven and back at the edge of Stonebury, looking around at the carnage with scraped palms, trying to name the feeling of relief as it rose and swept through her like a wild thing. Melchior, when he extended his hand and called her his daughter for the first and last time. She couldn’t leave if she wanted to anymore. She couldn’t break the spell.   
  
But she didn’t feel chained to a doomed future.  
  
“Velvet, promise me something.”  
  
“What?”  
  
“That you’re going to make me emotional when you go. I want to  _bawl._ ” _I want you to win. Take everything back!_  
  
_You’re my best friend.  
  
You’re going to hurt me the worst._  
  
Velvet stared at her, looking stunned, then reached for Magilou’s free hand with her right and pulled it to her chest, over her sternum where the thump--thump--thump beat steadily, firmly, gently. She pressed her hand flat, smothered it between two warm spaces, and that was enough. It would have to be. It was all the magic they had left.  
  
She said softly, “I already am.”

**Author's Note:**

> ........aaaand in some lovely AU out there Velvet gets to bake quiche forever (but not in this tale)! Cries.
> 
> I hope you enjoyed this disaster! Also hopefully canon is correct here, because my memory is way too rusty to know otherwise currently. This was definitely inspired by one of the final skits in the game, "The Last Bet," where Magilou teases Velvet about being her best friend. There's also a conversation with a NPC in Stonebury that discusses the troupe Magilou had originally been a part, which was particularly striking. And I ran with it.


End file.
